Verifone North America President Joe Mach shares insight on what retailers are doing, the big trends in play with customer experience and how consumers are spurring trends and retail customer experience strategies.

Digital signage is a viable and effective communications tool, but companies taking the first step in signage deployment will be much more successful on the playing field if they understand the basics of what digital media is and how it operates. Learn the basics of digital signage and how to make it most effective.

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Chris Petersen

Chris Petersen Chris H. Petersen, PhD, CEO of Integrated Marketing Solutions is a strategic consultant who specializes in retail, leadership, marketing, and measurement. He has built a legacy through working with Fortune 500 companies to achieve measurable results in improving their performance and partnerships. Chris is the founder of IMS Retail University, a series of strategic workshops focusing on the critical elements of competing profitably in the increasingly complex retail marketplace. www

Chris Petersen writes on how Amazon and Alibaba, two great disruptors of traditional bricks and mortar retail, are focused on creating new models that will serve the rising expectations of today's customers.

As Chris Petersen writes, Amazon has simply been one of the most innovative retailers executing consumer choice and convenience and now is proving why distributors could be retailers' new BFFs: Best Friends in Fulfillment.

Chris Petersen believes true innovation demands a willingness to take the risks to fail faster. Companies that don't embrace failure as a part of innovation risk becoming irrelevant with fewer options to survive.

In mature categories with declining volumes and margins, there are immense pressures on the c-suite to innovate. Consumers have already voted for a seamless experience across time and place. Future success will require "omni-retail" of engaging consumers when, where and how they want to shop and purchase.

For today's consumers, omnichannel is their "new normal." They now shop and purchase anytime and everywhere. What this means for traditional retailers is that they must become more flexible and "seamless."

Declaring you are omnichannel is the easy part. Achieving profitability will require balancing the tradeoffs of long-tail assortments vs. the ability to deliver a quality experience integrating the virtual and physical shelf.